Shouts. Men scuffling and yelling in the street. Laughter. Bloody wogs. The shabby curtain flying back and something lobbing in through the open door but no one moving in the room. No one knowing what it was except Stern.
Stern hit the man beside him and saw the astonished expression on the man's face as he went crashing backward across the floor, away from the hand grenade slowly sailing through the air.
But to Stern at that moment it wasn't a hand grenade at all but a no longer distant cloud high above the Temple of the Moon, a drifting memory in the desert of dim pillars and fountains and waterways, mysterious places where myrrh grew, the ruins of his youth.
Blinding light then in the mirror behind the bar, sudden death merging the stars and windstorms of his life with darkness in the failure of his seeking, bright blinding light in the night sky at last and Stern's once vast vision of a homeland for all the peoples of his heritage gone as if he had never lived, shattered as if he had never suffered, his futile devotion ended on a clear Cairo night during the uncertain campaigns of 1942 when the eternal disguise he wore to his last clandestine meeting, his face, was ripped away and thrown against a mirror in the half-light of an Arab bar, there to stare at a now immobile landscape fixed to witness his death forever.